Blanche Violet Maher

I accepted the challenge to bake these biscuits using a recipe from 100 years ago in the notebook of photographer Blanche Violet Maher.

There was no Method in the original recipe so I referred to the “Basic Biscuit Recipe” from The Commonsense Cookery Book first published in 1914. I also used my great-grandmother’s *Bakewell mixing bowl. The camera featured in this image is my 90 year old mother’s Box Brownie.

Blanche Violet Maher (b.1874) was an Australian photographer who lived with her family on Collaroy Station in the Upper Hunter Region of New South Wales, Australia.

By all reports the biscuits were delicious and reminiscent of Ginger Nuts.

* #BakewellBrothers Ltd was established by William Bakewell, born in England in Nottingham county, who began making bricks and pipes on their Erskineville site in around 1884. The firm gradually developed to include the manufacture of tiles, pots, jars and other domestic and commercial wares.

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Mass Isolation

The really enchanting folx are always on the opposite side of the street.

Rest in peace, Uncle Vincent Wenberg.


Condolences to Uncle Vince’s family and the KBH family.

I made this portrait of Uncle Vince in September 2002 at the site of the former Kinchela Boys Home near Kempsey, NSW, on the first Journey Home.

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The first photograph I ever printed

This is the first photograph I ever printed myself, in a makeshift darkroom at school when I was 16 (my photography teacher was a maths teacher with a hobby and it was the 1970s).

I made the photograph of Meg in our backyard when I was about 14 or 15.

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Aunty Jean and the Sacred Grass Tree, 
Wreck Bay, 1999


Community Elder Aunty Jean Carter was taken away from her parents in La Perouse when she arrived home from school one day in 1948. Four members of her family were forcibly removed from their parents Robert and Lucy McKenzie on the same day.

‘I just remember coming home from school and Mum was at the door, and there was this car on the road outside. There was this white woman standing there and I can hear Mum saying, “Can’t you give me time to get the kids ready?” And she said “No, they’ve got to go now” … We were whisked away really quickly and there was only Mum there. We were never told why we were taken.’

Aunty Jean was taken to Cootamundra Girls’ Home and was trained to become a domestic worker.  Girls were sent to Cootamundra Girls' Home until the age of 14 then assigned to work at rural properties where they “were lucky not to be sexually, physically and mentally abused”. Many girls became pregnant in domestic service, only to have their children in turn removed and institutionalised. Generations of Aboriginal women passed through Cootamundra Girls' Home until it closed in 1969. While at the home, Aunty Jean’s mother died and she was told that there was no need for her to attend the funeral because ‘she didn’t know her mother very well.’

After leaving the girls’ home Aunty Jean settled in Wreck Bay.  During her life she has been Secretary of the Aborigines Progress Association, active in the Country Women’s Association, the Family Planning Association, and was the Director of the Jilimi Centre for Aboriginal women for which she received an award for service to the community.  Aunty Jean also worked for Shoalhaven Women’s Resource Centre and World Vision’s Indigenous Program.

from the Photographic Memory exhibition, McGlade Gallery, 2019

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